European privacy regulators are to force internet companies to extend their application of the “right to be forgotten” ruling by demanding that they remove contentious web links from American as well as European search engines.

The Article 29 Working Party, the umbrella group that represents privacy regulators from each of the 28 European states, said yesterday that limiting link removals to EU search engines alone was not enough to protect individuals’ privacy rights.

The European Court of Justice ruled this year that individuals have a right to ask search engines to remove web links that point to information about them.

Since then, Google, by far the largest in Europe, has accepted about two in five of more than 200,000 requests for link removals, mainly from